Corey Smith's blog

I find it fascinating how often I.T. is assigned to the task of building a website. For the uninitiated, this may seem like a logical thing to do. After all, a website is technology and requires programming and stuff, right?

Wrong.

A very small part of a website is programming. A very small part of a website is technology. Oh, it might take a lot of work. It might be a requirement for the site to function properly, but I.T. should really not have a say in what the customer sees… the face or the marketing aspect of the site.

In my opinion, here are the top five components of a website… in order of importance.

In the course of designing websites, I often get requests from clients that simply go against normal design conventions. I think that the struggle that most people have is that design conventions have changed but nobody told them.

Design from the 90s like large logos, starbursts and bright, obnoxious colors were great when the web was in its infancy and pages were built by amateurs. Your clients expect more from businesses today and don't want to look at a site that doesn't take into consideration current design principles.

Remember. Bigger isn't always better... it is just bigger. More color doesn't necessarily mean better.. it is just more.

When you are redesigning or redefining your company’s image, one of the things that is very hard to do it to step back and understand who your real audience is.

Designing a logo, a website, a brochure or even something as simple as a blog post is not a task to have the attitude of, "I like it, so it is good."

The most important thing about any design is to remember your audience. Who are the people that you want to attract? When you do something personal, it is all about you. When you do something for your business, it is all about them.

When it comes to search engines, content is king. The more often you update your content and the more rich in keywords your content is, the better you will be found.

The problem is that many web developers simply don't understand some of the basics. Pages need to  be optimized... not just the site. What this means is that rather than looking at your site as a whole and trying to get all the keywords you can on all the pages, optimize your document management page for document management and your printers page for printers.

You need to make sure that you do everything you can to build in ways for the search engines to understand that you are relevant to your readers.

Here are the three key secrets that you need to make sure that you adhere to when building your site... and your pages. They are in no particular order.

Your customers are your life blood. Selling hardware and software solutions is an important part of your business, however, it is not the end all to what you do. Great service after the sale is where you really shine. Great service can make or break a new sale. Great service can define whether or not you will have a good year or a bad year.

With that in mind, you need to find anyway possible to engage your customers they way they want to be engaged.

The most common way to accept service calls is by a trained dispatch person via the phone. This is a very time consuming process and can be very costly because a dispatch person can only handle one call at a time. Since dealerships understand that it is very time consuming, they have offered webforms, email and automated services like eAutomate's e-info.

However, I would suggest there is a better way.

That is live chat. Since I think it is so important, I am going to show you how to do it... easily.

FTP, or file transfer protocol, is one of the standards for communicating large amounts of information via the internet. If you have a website to load, or just some files to load that you want to have accessible from a website, using FTP is the easiest way to get your files online via your webserver.

In order to load files appropriately to your web server, you'll need a good FTP client. There are a number of clients available, some are free, some cost money. On the Mac, Fetch is probably one of the best available... but costs a few dollars. You can use Filezilla on just about any platform. On the Windoz side I prefer to use WinSCP.

As a side note, when we build websites, we allow our clients to use our content management platform to add images and files directly to the page without having to use anything but the web browser. But, usually, there are size limitations. We only allow the upload of files less than 1mb. If our clients want to add larger files, they will want to use FTP.

As more and more content is moving web based... especially information that you want to share with your clients on your web page, I think that it is important to understand how easy it is to load content on your web server using FTP.

Since most of my clients are on Windoz platform, I'll provide simple instructions on how to setup your FTP client using WinSCP as the client, upload your files and link to them on the web page you are building.

In my line of work, you can imagine, I spend a lot of time working with clients on websites. We build websites for clients and want to make sure they go live the right way. I get questions all the time about how to understand how the internet works.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for the Domain Name System. The DNS records tell the internet where to send your internet traffic. The most common (that I will discuss later) are address (A) records, CNAME records, name server (NS) records and mail exchange (MX) records.

Many web developers simply tell their clients to point the Name Server Record to the new host and you let the web developer manage that for you. The problem you face is that you lose control of your website. If something happens to your developer or you have a falling out, your website and email can stop working... in a heart beat.

So, what does this mean for you? How do you know what you should do to maintain functionality of your site and your email? Bear in mind that my descriptions below are what I tell my my clients, but I think everyone should follow these rules.

SEO, or search engine optimization, may not be rocket science, but there are many things that you can do to make your website more findable on the web. There are a number of things that I do when I build my client sites that make a big difference in how they are found on the web. I won't share all of them (don't want to give away trade secrets), but there are some key things you should do.

I bring this up because I am amazed how few websites I see actually implement these items. These are reasonable simple things that you can do to improve your search rankings. Yet, for some reason, the majority of web developers don't even try to implement them.

Bear in mind, if you need help with this on your site or want an analysis of how you are doing, you can just contact us.

I have mentioned some of these before, but some of them are so important, they deserve another mention.

There is a lot of information that we are expected to digest on a regular basis. Sometimes, it can be daunting to consume so much in such a short period of time.

We have email, web pages, radio, TV, telephone and any number of other sources of information.

Personally, I want my information aggregated into one place so that I can skim through it all and decide in a few seconds if it is worth reading.

I don't like newspapers because I get one set of information and lot of ads that I have to read through.

I don't like news via email because sometimes it can be a pain to sort through... and email is slow.

I don't like going to a web page until I know that the information there is what I want to read.

Enter RSS.

But, what is RSS and why in the world should I care about it on my site?

Although, with the way some people talk, you'd think that it was. True, there are some components that make it a little more complicated to understand... after all, that is why SEOs make $15,000 or more per site just to optimize website content... once. Then, usually they'll charge a hefty fee monthly to make sure that the site stays optimized... after all, SEO is not a one time event.

SEO is something that needs to be continually addressed. Not only does a site need to have new content added all the time, but the existing, static content, needs to be adjusted, changed and modified. If your site isn't evolving, then why in the world would someone ever come back?

If your customers have already seen your brochure, do they go back to it very often to try and glean new information? Then why do we seem to think that people will do that with our static and never changing sites?

So, if Search Engine Optimization isn't Rocket Science, then what is it?

It is time consuming and requires effort. It requires patience and practice. But, given the right knowledge, you can understand the basics. Here are the five elements of content that you should consider for your site.